When staking, how do you select a validator? What makes you decide to choose it? Fame, the highest voting power, or the lowest commission fee? While there are many considerations, we recommend prioritizing three key factors we value most: performance, contribution, and communication. Let’s break them down and understand why they are essential in a few cases!

Everything Everywhere All at Performance

For validators and delegators alike, slashing is one of the most fatal accidents. Therefore, performance is a factor that should be checked as a top priority. Validators’ performance isn’t just how fast it processes transactions; furthermore, it is more than the speed that encompasses many other factors, including stability and trustworthiness, to the network’s overall health and success.

For instance, you can see in the tweet below that even the most famous validators were not immune to losing credibility in UST-depeg crisis on the Terra blockchain last year, emphasizing the significance of durability and reliability. Although this event was an immense tragedy, it became a stage to test the resilience and dependability of validators, triggering hundreds of thousands of transactions.
https://twitter.com/GoldenStaking/status/1524143546701213696

Virtuous circle maketh Network

Validators are fundamentally the cornerstones of the network in terms of infrastructure, but they are also responsible for helping the network flourish as delegation grantees. Contributions to the network we validate can bring more value to the chain, creating a virtuous circle that empowers us to contribute even more.

By delegating to a validator who contributes to the network, you can earn rewards and support the work to grow faster!

So Long, and Thanks for All the messages

There are tons of memes on social networks to entertain and get people’s attention. It helps people to get interested in blockchain and make it more accessible. For a more active blockchain life, you will need tons of communication with other users and validators like us. However, when users often need someone to answer their questions, most users haven’t had a chance to talk to validators since there is rarely a channel to enter quickly.

Validators are one of the closest groups users can contact to understand the network as well as who understands the network best. In addition, they are always under an obligation to respond to their delegators’ questions, such as what’s the decision-making process in governance. In the same context as the virtuous cycle described above, it is particularly important to set up a place for the public since its history also serves as an archive for beginners to understand the network in depth. This factor is hard to measure but worth comparing as it can be a criterion of how engaged a validator is in the network.

DELIGHT as a Validator

DELIGHT LABS has been operating validators in various networks, and we’ve demonstrated our commitment since the beginning. Especially during UST-depeg event period mentioned above, we were proud to have our validator handle it without a single flaw.

Also, our team has built several decentralized exchanges(DEX) on various networks, and they have been helping users to trade their assets easily on their network. All of our DEXs claim to be Community-DEX, and the team does not take any financial profit. Therefore, all the commissions derived from trading are passed on to the liquidity provider. We keep building and updating apps for a better DEX experience. Following these contributions, we have multiple channels like Discord, Twitter, and email to communicate with users. They ask us about not only Dapps we built but also the network, governance, etc.

In addition to developing applications, We also contribute to building the network. We have been developing the core in the XPLA Chain as a technical partner, and recently, we completed research on Cosmwasm integration to the EOS network. Given the growing interest in interchain connectivity, we are running IBC relayers between many Cosmos-based chains, such as Axelar, Cosmos, and XPLA.

You can check the network we validate and look at our performance and reputation at the links below. Also, if you’d like to support us, you can stake your token with us. 😉

Casperlabs: https://cspr.live/validator/01a6901408eda702a653805f50060bfe00d5e962747ee7133df64bd7bab50b4643

Evmos

• Validator Info: https://www.mintscan.io/evmos/validators/evmosvaloper1juhvrddz4ch74tnvqrdn46t2fy78hg70mjspt6
• Staking Center: https://wallet.keplr.app/chains/evmos?modal=validator&chain=evmos_9001-2&validator_address=evmosvaloper1juhvrddz4ch74tnvqrdn46t2fy78hg70mjspt6

Fetch.ai

• Validator Info: https://explore.fetch.ai/validator/fetchvaloper1h249gj063tdwjkumccx0vq542hkkm3tkl3tp5z
• Staking Center: https://browse-fetchhub.fetch.ai/validators

Findora: https://findorascan.io/node/80E064A00A421569F1222ECAB1E296D7F58D8354

Icon

• Wallet Extension: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hana-wallet/jfdlamikmbghhapbgfoogdffldioobgl/related

Medibloc

• Validator Info: https://www.mintscan.io/medibloc/validators/panaceavaloper1wuxlx59eupsvxtjy36eua0z8p70g5exjdxt8dj
• Staking Center: https://wallet.cosmostation.io/medibloc/delegate — Orbs: https://staking.orbs.network/

Osmosis

• Validator Info: https://www.mintscan.io/osmosis/validators/osmovaloper1mt33s7d3mdshunkt37tkugumq3uxfw2wcvrspk
• Staking Center: https://wallet.keplr.app/chains/osmosis?modal=validator&chain=osmosis-1&validator_address=osmovaloper1mt33s7d3mdshunkt37tkugumq3uxfw2wcvrspk

Rizon

• Validator Info: https://www.mintscan.io/rizon/validators/rizonvaloper1fshqmgvtm0s8t6t9lc4eexs2kaz6lwzy60dwgm
• Staking Center: https://wallet.cosmostation.io/rizon/delegate

Skale: https://activate.codefi.network/staking/skale/validators

Terra: https://station.terra.money/validator/terravaloper1f6wuq93320s6w7vvnkc0576g9mtqfmz9a8wqxk

Terra Classic: https://station.terra.money/validator/terravaloper1fjuvyccn8hfmn5r7wc2t3kwqy09zzp6tyjcf50

Threshold: https://dashboard.threshold.network/staking

XPLA: https://vault.xpla.io/stake/xplavaloper1mse6m62jjpnn0kecmp5cemxqu6tkeqh6tah5f5#delegate

The Delegator’s Guide to the PoS Blockchain was originally published in DELIGHT LABS on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

👋 Introducing Terraswap

Not too long ago, Terra’s Columbus-4 mainnet upgrade brought CosmWasm smart contracts to the Terra ecosystem. As long-standing supporters and validators for the Terra network, the DELIGHT team is delighted to announce that we are taking the next step forward by launching Terraswap, powered by the smart contract layer on top of the Terra blockchain!

Inspired by Uniswap, Terraswap creates automatic, decentralized markets for token pairs allowing users to exchange assets directly on-chain. Pairs can be created between native Terra assets (Luna, UST, KRT, etc.) and CW20 tokens (user-defined tokens). Terraswap will debut with the current four active Terra stablecoins against Luna, competing against Terra’s native on-chain atomic swap. These starting pairs will diversify on-chain liquidity and provide a more robust means to arbitrage that does not alter the supply of Terra and Luna, thereby enhancing the stability mechanism.

⚖️ Initial Launch Pairs

• UST/LUNA
• KRT/LUNA
• MNT/LUNA
• SDT/LUNA

Trading for the initial pairs will go live on Nov. 13 (Friday), 9PM KST.

We’re excited for Terraswap to play a central role in facilitating the cross-pollination of novel solutions on the Terra blockchain.

🌪 DeFi Invades Terra

Terraswap will also finally provide users on Terra with another avenue of generating yield other than LUNA staking — users can choose to become liquidity providers by depositing assets (which they can later withdraw) to Terraswap pools, which help trades execute at lower fees. For this, they are compensated with LP tokens, which entitle them to a share of the protocol trading fees and can be used in other DeFi applications on Terra.

We have embraced the composability of Terra’s smart contract architecture and designed Terraswap to be a foundational primitive for the budding Terra DeFi ecosystem. Terraswap LP tokens can be used inside other smart contracts to extend the power of Terraswap onto other applications. Developers can simply plug in Terraswap as a reusable component to instantly add automated on-chain markets to their next dApp. Additional incentives can even be created on top of LP tokens to quickly generate liquid markets and encourage activity and participation.

🚀 To Liquidity and Beyond

With new projects just around the corner, we’re excited for Terraswap to play a central role in facilitating the cross-pollination of novel solutions on the Terra blockchain. Beyond simple ports of Ethereum DeFi’s mainstays such as MakerDAO, Synthetix, Compound, etc. we’re looking forward to supporting the types of applications that only make sense to build on Terra, starting with the listing of a new class of assets that map to real world value within the next 10 days. We also imagine user-facing investment products with synthetic asset exposure, cross-chain DeFi yield farming, yield-bearing stocks powered by Anchor, etc. — the possibilities are truly boundless.

🛠 Terraswap Resources

1. Terraswap: https://terraswap.io
2. Github: https://github.com/terraswap/terraswap
3. Terraswap Docs: https://docs.terraswap.io

💬 Stay Updated

Follow us at twitter.com/delightlabs_io!

DELIGHT LABS Launch AMM DEX Terraswap on the Terra Blockchain was originally published in DELIGHT LABS on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.